If Learning Designs capture the heart of the education process, then could we, by analogy, call them the “source code” of teaching? And if teachers then share their Learning Designs with each other under open content licenses, then does this represent the birth of open source teaching?
I put forward this idea in a keynote presentation for ED-MEDIA in 2006 1.
The emphasis, for me, is on Learning Design as the “Source (code of) Teaching”, and then applying an open content license makes it Open (Source (code of) Teaching) - rather than the emphasis being “Open Source” for/of Teaching. As ugly as this close textual analysis is, it turns out to be important.
I am happy to call the Creative Commons 2 BY-SA-NC (Attribution, Share Alike, Non-commercial) license (the typical license used in the LAMS Community) an “open” license. But when I ran the terms “open” “source” and “teaching” together, some colleagues took exception to this phrase being applied to Learning Designs that are licensed in a way that is incompatible with the Open Source Definition and the Free Software Definition (ie, no restriction on fields of endeavour, including commercial endeavours).
On the other hand, I've spoken to many educators who are comfortable with open sharing of their educational work for non-commercial purposes, but would be uncomfortable with a blanket license that permits any kind of commercial use as well (in passing, I should note that the issue here is rarely that users of the non-commercial clause are against any kind of commercial use; rather, they would like to be asked first, and have the option to negotiate terms on a case-by-case basis, typically with the implication that if someone else makes money from their work, they'd like a cut).
So I remain uncertain how to address this challenge: if most of my colleagues only feel comfortable to share their work on a non-commercial basis, then is it better to encourage them to share their work (and hence ultimately improve education) rather than trying to persuade them to change their mind about allowing commercial use (and run the risk of them not sharing if they are not persuaded)?
I still really like the phrase “open source teaching”, primarily because of the image of Learning Design as the “source code” of teaching. But I've held off using this term any further because I don't feel that the issues above have been resolved. Regardless of the term, I see great potential in the open sharing of Learning Designs to foster improved education for a better world.
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